SIMS 141: Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business

Readings, Assignments, Discussion Section Topics

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Speaker Schedule, Lecture Notes

Readings, Assignments, Discussion Sections

Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business
SIMS 141

(due Friday Dec 9, 7pm PST)

Discussion Section Locations

Tue 4-5: Room 205 South Hall (FW)
Wed 3-4: Room 110 South Hall (FW)
Wed 4-5: Room 205 South Hall (HK)

Readings, Assignments, Discussion Section Topics

Week of Aug 29 Topic: Course Introduction; Overview of How Search Engines Work

Readings: None
Discussion section topic: No meeting this week.

Week of Sept 5 No class (campus Holiday).
Readings: Chapters 1-3 of Battelle; review Week 1 lecture notes
Discussion section topic: How search engines work; how HTML works

Week of Sept 12 Topic: Search and Society.
Readings: Interpreting Your Query from GoogleGuide
Finish chapters 1-3 of Battelle
Discussion section topic: Discuss Battelle lecture; practice advanced queries

Week of Sept 19 Topic: How Search Engines work; Usability and Search

Readings:
Chapter 1 of Finding Out About, Richard Belew, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Understanding User Goals in Web Search, Rose and Levinson, Proc. WWW Conference, NY, 2004.

Discussion section topics: Discuss topics for next week's lecture; discuss Pedersen and Rose lectures; go over Assignment 1.
Assignment 1 (due Thur Oct 6, updated from Oct 5).

Week of Sept 26 Topic: Search Personalization, News Search, student-chosen topics

Readings: Chapters 4-5 of Battelle

Week of Oct 3 Topic: TBA

Readings: Chapters 6 and 9 of Battelle
About.com introduction to Peer-to-Peer networking
Discussion section topic: Peer-to-peer networks, intro to auctions and search advertising models

Week of Oct 10 Topics: Search Ad Auctions; Intellectual Property and Search

Readings: Chapters 7-8 of Battelle
Auctions reading: Wikipedia article on auction types
Intellectual Property readings:

About Google Print, Google website.
Search and Rescue, Tim O'Reilly, NY Times opinion piece, Sept 28, 2005.
Google and Copyright Law (third opinion piece down), Christian Science Monitor Opinion Pages, Sept 28, 2005.
Authors Guild Sues Google, EFF, Sept 20, 2005.
Why Don't Book Publishers Object To Web Indexing?, Danny Sullivan, SearchEngineWatch, Aug 30, 2005.
In Challenge to Google, Yahoo Will Scan Books, New York Times, Oct 3, 2005.
Discussion section topic: Ad auctions and copyright issues and search.

Week of Oct 17 Topic: Desktop Search; Web Spam

Readings: (optional)

Dumais et al., Stuff I've seen: a system for personal information retrieval and re-use, Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2003 (pdf)
(This may be too technical for some of you)
Fetterly, Manasse, and Najork, Spam, damn spam, and statistics: using statistical analysis to locate spam web pages, Proceedings of WebDB 2004. (pdf)
Assignment 2 (due Friday Oct 28, 5pm)
Discussion section topic: Desktop search and web spam

Week of Oct 24 Topic: Search and Privacy

Week of Oct 31 Topic: Search Engine Architecture

Final Projects Description (topic due Monday Nov 14th, 2pm)

Week of Nov 7 Topic: Search Engine Marketing; Enterprise Search; Information Quality

Week of Nov 14 Topic: Multimedia Search

Week of Nov 21 Topic: Searching the "Live Web" (Blogs, RSS, etc.)

Week of Nov 28 Topic: TBA

Week of Dec 5 Topic: Course Wrapup

Turn in Final Project (due Friday Dec 9, 7pm PST)